Taking a Closer Look at the Causes of Crime : Law enforcement: Armed with a grant, Westminster police are studying rising delinquency among young Southeast Asians.

Scrambling to get ahead of an expected wave of juvenile crime, the city’s Police Department has joined hands with Vietnamese community leaders and entered a world of research that until now has been the almost exclusive domain of ivory tower academics.

In September, the department brought a social psychologist on staff as director of an in-house research unit, and last month won a grant for a yearlong study of the causes of delinquency in Southeast Asian youth.

Researchers working with the Vietnamese Community of Orange County Inc. hope to interview 800 youth and parents and develop enough cultural and social insight to craft a program that will stop crime in the city’s most gang-prone population before it starts, said Westminster Police Chief James Cook.

“There are very few prevention programs aimed at Vietnamese youth--anywhere that we know of,” said Cook, who has experience as a researcher and has worked at California Youth Authority, the state’s youth prison. “I view the little research unit that we have as a change agent.”

The 100-officer Police Department competed with universities and social services agencies for the $150,000 grant from the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, said Douglas R. Kent, the social psychologist who heads the department’s three-member research unit.

“The entire solution in Westminster can’t be to lock everyone up. We have to know why youth engage in delinquent behavior,” Kent said. “We need to take into account the cultural factors that are at play.”

The Cal State Long Beach instructor began working with Westminster police several years ago to evaluate the city’s pioneering gang suppression program, known as TARGET, and is also busily writing grant proposals for programs that would redefine the department’s approach to domestic violence and basic crime prevention.

“We’re taking science and trying to solve a practical problem now. That’s what I’m doing as a social psychologist in a police department,” Kent said. “This is the front line.”

With that in mind, a group of Southeast Asian community leaders and counselors will gather next month with academic experts in group and gang behavior to formulate theories about causes of delinquency in the community, Kent said.

Researchers will then set out to interview as many as 800 youths, both those involved in gangs and those who are not, to test out those theories. Staff of the Vietnamese Community of Orange County Inc. will conduct the interviews and also provide translation assistance, Kent said.

While the project will focus mainly on Vietnamese youth, who make up the majority of Westminster’s Southeast Asian population, researchers also will interview Laotian and Cambodian teens.

The project aims to examine who is committing youth crime in the city--looking at both gang-affiliated youths and other groups of teens who don’t belong to gangs, but regularly break curfew, loiter and disturb the peace, potential precursors to more serious criminal behavior.

The second question is, why? And an answer may help steer youth away from crime.

“The services are out there, but the intervention strategies that have been implemented often are based on very limited knowledge of the problems that these youth face,” said Nghia Tran, executive director of the Vietnamese Community of Orange County Inc. “With this project, we hope to move the focus of our services from remedial to preventive. That, in the end, will have a tremendous impact on the overall well being of the community.”

Tran said gang counselors often are in the dark about the youth they serve.

“The family structure, the economic environment of Little Saigon, the community support system, all of these domains are often misunderstood by the mainstream institutions,” he said. “You cannot provide a cookie cutter method in terms of human services.”

The Westminster research grant comes at an ominous time, with law enforcement officials across the country bracing for an epidemic in teen crime as the so-called “echo boom” matures. These youngsters, children of the aging baby-boomers, will soon create a demographic bubble increasingly prone to law-breaking and gun violence.

Even though the overall crime rate fell nationwide last year, FBI Director Louis J. Freeh and other law enforcement leaders have made public note of the increasing violent crime by children, which is expected to soar.

The state legislative analyst recently issued a report on the daunting increase in juvenile arrests. The juvenile arrest rate for violent crime in California climbed 53% from 1985 to 1993, the report showed. The report predicted that youth crime would increase by 29% over the next decade, even if overall arrest rates stay the same.

“We are moving as fast as we can to prepare prevention programs and head some of this off,” Cook said.

In 1994, city police officers arrested 607 juveniles, 239 of those for felonies. Westminster police estimate that 60% of suspected gang members in the city are Vietnamese.

Of the estimated 130,000 Vietnamese in Orange County, about 45,000 are youths from 6 to 17, with many concentrated in Little Saigon, the country’s largest Vietnamese community.

The yearlong research program could offer the city the only available data on why Southeast Asian youth--often caught between their home culture and the pressure to Americanize at school--turn to law-breaking. For federal officials who awarded the grant, the study could have wide-reaching applications.

“The way that they are going to be looking at this, and using basic law enforcement records, other police departments can use the same techniques if they wish to,” said Ellen Grigg, program manager for the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

The grant application was the first the federal agency had received to study growing Asian gang problems, another reason Westminster’s proposal was approved over eight others, Grigg said.

For a police department to engage in this kind of research is “completely unusual,” said George Felkens, a criminologist at the Claremont Graduate School who has published widely on gang crime and will help direct the study.

“Usually, police department research is, ‘How quick you can fire 15 rounds out of the pistol?’ ” said Felkens, who has worked with numerous law enforcement agencies. “Their research is not usually culturally based. It’s usually very practically based to help them do a better job.”

The fact that the Police Department is conducting its own research, Felkens said, will eliminate another common obstacle that academics often face while studying gangs and crime: Access to records.

Police Chief Cook said the research unit will help evaluate the effectiveness of programs and make sure any new efforts spend taxpayer money wisely.

“If you don’t do that you’re just kidding yourself. You’re just wasting your money and the government’s money,” Cook said.

Kent’s research unit has also been busy on the other proposals. Since September, Kent has drafted a proposal for the department to launch an innovative domestic violence program that would team up social service providers and prosecutors with officers, and another effort to craft a crime prevention program to train resident leaders in neighborhoods.

“We’ve been very busy here,” Kent said. “It’s exciting. It’s exciting because it matters.”